How to Make Your Infrastructure DevOps Ready

The DevOps approach to software delivery calls for close collaboration between development and operations teams across an ongoing series of short, fast release cycles that get new applications and features to market quickly and reliably.

A core requirement of DevOps is for programmers and QA engineers to have on-demand access to development and test beds that closely mirror the latest production environment, so that truly production-ready code can be created and verified on an aggressive schedule. It’s this infrastructure-on-demand requirement that holds back many organizations from adopting the DevOps model, despite its promise of competitive advantage. For many or even most organizations, their traditional IT infrastructure was built for stability and predictability, and not for the type of daily responsiveness required by DevOps.

Catalogic ECX copy data management software solves this problem and makes DevOps possible for any organization by enabling on-demand provisioning of development and test environments that mirror production environments – without you having to change a thing about your underlying infrastructure.

Catalogic Makes Your Existing Infrastructure More Agile

Catalogic ECX is a software-only solution for managing, automating, and analyzing the creation and use of copy data – copies of production data –for use cases such as DevOps, backup and recovery, and business analytics. Unlike other copy data management solutions that dictate disruptive insertions of new hardware and duplicative capabilities into your environment, Catalogic ECX leverages the powerful snapshotting and replication technologies native to today’s leading storage and virtualization systems. Installing in minutes and working without agents, Catalogic ECX acts as a lightweight automation and orchestration layer on top of your existing storage and virtualization infrastructure, invoking the APIs of your NetApp, IBM, EMC, or VMware systems and making it faster and easier for you and your internal customers to create, distribute, and use copy data.

Catalogic DevOps = Dev Self-Service, Bounded By Ops Best Practices

There’s a seemingly irreconcilable tension between an agile Dev team’s need for production-like development and test beds on demand and the Ops team’s need to ensure that each deployment of infrastructure aligns with high-level objectives regarding cost, performance, compliance, and so on. Catalogic ECX resolves the tension by enabling Ops to create best-practice based automation templates for the creation and use of copy data, and to publish those templates as a service catalog complete with role-based access controls and a user-friendly web console. Authorized Dev team members can then utilize those published services to spin up virtualized replicas of all or part of the production environment, either recurrently on a schedule or instantly on demand.

To further automate and accelerate the creation of development and test environments, Catalogic ECX services can be invoked through a REST API. This enables application teams to integrate the provisioning and tear-down of needed environments into their existing automated build or configuration management routines, turning the ideal of “infrastructure as code” into a daily reality.

Release Fast and Release Right

While discussions of DevOps tend to focus on speed and agility, equally important is the DevOps emphasis on quality – after all, it does no software maker any good to rapidly churn out buggy releases. Here again Catalogic ECX is transformative. By making it far faster and easier for the application team to refresh their copy of production data, Catalogic ECX empowers the team to do their coding and verification work in an environment that mirrors where production is now, rather than where it was last week or last month. This ability of Dev to work in near real-time environments makes it far more likely that new applications and features will shine when they’re released to production.

Experience the Power of ECX in 15 minutes!

Learn More About How Catalogic ECX Can Make Your Infrastructure DevOps Ready

DevOps is a movement in IT focused on fostering better communications and processes across operations and development teams, with the primary goal of faster, more agile software delivery. Infrastructure management is a fundamental building block for any organization striving to achieve a DevOps method. Catalogic Software’s ECX delivers a management platform that makes DevOps possible using existing enterprise storage.

DevOps is a methodology that creates a much tighter relationship between the development team and the operations team with the goal of faster software product delivery. IT professionals of all types should get a basic understanding of the DevOps phenomenon, enabling them to decide whether this approach is right for their organization. Innovative vendors like Catalogic Software help customers to move toward DevOps without the infrastructure upheaval by delivering data management orchestration software that enables infrastructure as code leveraging existing infrastructure.

6 minutes

Make Your Enterprise Storage DevOps Ready with Catalogic ECX

Have six minutes to spare? This video featuring Catalogic CEO Ed Walsh provides a clear, information discussion of how Catalogic ECX enables DevOps on enterprise storage. It includes a product demonstration showing Catalogic ECX working in conjunction with Puppet Software to drive DevOps automation.

7 minutes

DevOps with IBM UrbanCode and Catalogic ECX

Struggling to deploy DevOps methodologies against current IT production data? This seven minute video discusses the problem – long, complex deployment cycles that are difficult to repeat. A demonstration of provisioning systems through UrbanCode Deploy is included.

7 minutes

IBM Bluemix with Catalogic ECX: DevOps Use Case

One of the major challenges to using cloud compute for DevOps is the ability to leverage system-of-record data for use with system-of-engagement applications. This three minute video explains how with Catalogic ECX you can easily extend your system-of-record data into the IBM Bluemix cloud to drive DevOps development. The video includes a demonstration.

How can Catalogic ECX copy data management software help you?

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In Their Words

"Given the unfettered growth of unstructured data across primary storage systems, there is a clear need for a more granular level of intelligence on the disposition of data across storage - for rapid search, compliance, storage reclamation. The ECX Enterprise Catalog is an innovative new technology that addresses these needs and is very well aligned with NetApp's Snapshot approach. With ECX, Catalogic is uniquely providing search and reporting capabilities that give deep insights into NetApp ONTAP and VMware."

— George Crump, Founder, Storage Switzerland

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